= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
David_Gerard comments on We're all forgetting how to read analog clocks. Or are we? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (32)
I'm 43. I grew up with analogue clocks and a few early digital ones (this was the 1970s). As a child, I had a toy which had a clock face with minute and hour hands, and a mechanically-linked display of the time the hands were indicating, to a five-minute resolution - it didn't actually look like this, but that'll give you the idea.
I seem to think of an hour as divided into twelve five-minute parts, each of which divides into five individual minutes. If I look at a digital display of the time (e.g. looking at the clock at the top of my netbook screen just now), I process it as a certain way around a circular sixty-minute track. It was 4:55pm just now, so I visualised a minute hand in the last segment before the hour.
I stopped wearing a watch in 1996 as it was simply annoying me. I still wanted to know what time it was, but wearing a watch annoyed me more. I now tend to use my phone as a watch. When I did wear a watch, I had one for a while that had hands and a digital display, which I liked a lot - glance quickly at the hands, or look at the digits for precision.
I haven't measured if analogue is quicker, but it feels easier. Culturally comforting, in some way.
Which suggests that it actually is an issue of familiarity. Hmm. Thanks!
The thing that got me thinking about this in the first place was seeing that my sister has her phone set to display an analog clock, not a digital one, on the outer screen. I have the same model; I may do the same, for practice. (I'm annoyed by wristwatches, like you.)
Huh. For me it's the opposite. I always find it easier to glance at my wristwatch than to dig in my pocket for my phone. Part of it is that I keep my phone off most of the time, and because I hate purses/briefcases/etc. there's always lots of things in my pocket blocking the phone.